Dyed in the wool

I just got word that all 3 classes I proposed to Lincoln Land have been taken up so I will be teaching the following classes this fall:

September 19 & 26 - Knitting mittens and gloves
October 10, 17 & 24 - Learning to knit socks by knitting a Christmas stocking
November 14 - Knitting Jewelry Wire & Beads

The catalogue is supposed to be out in early September but if you're interested in one of the classes or know somone who is, you can click here to see the LLCC contact information. To get ready for the mitten/glove class I've been dying yarn. It's a bit of work but it's lots of fun to see how they all come out. Here are some samples of what I've been doing:

I've used a variety of dying methods and dyes including Kool-aid (the red skein in the middle of the 3rd picture), Jacquard dye (blue skein and rose skein in the second picture)from KnitPicks, and Wilton icing dye (for the rest). I love the Wilton dyes because they will often break up and you get really interesting effects. For instance, the skein of aqua and purples in the last picture was done using the Wilton black icing dye. The purple/green/aqua mix in the first skein of the second picture was done by mixing the Wilton black and Wilton teal. I'm never sure exactly what I'm going to get but because the colors have been mixed for a certain effect, you can be sure the colors will blend in the skein. These skeins are all worsted weight yarn but I also need to do a few skeins of fingering weight. The mixtures from today have certainly given me some ideas for other mixtures!

Desert Sunrise (or is it sunset?)

This is one of the skeins I dyed with Wilton cake icing dyes. Remember I said that you never know what you're going to get with some of the colors? This started out with the yarn having been cooked with tea bags. After that, on a third of it I added some brown. It was actually brown, not this sort of ginger, clay sort of color. Then on the other third I added some "Delphinium Blue" which is a lighter blue. It wasn't as strong as I wanted it so I added a bit of regular blue. Here's what happened:

Do you see any blue here other than the flecks of teal? No, because it broke up into pinks and purples and, of course, the teal. Who could have planned this?

Now I like the sample so much, I think I'm just going to keep going and make a nice little scarf. These aren't particularly my colors but I find it so fascinating, I think I'll enjoy it.

I did get some dying done this weekend as I’d planned. I started Thursday night dying some yarn I got last year at the Webs booth at Stitches. It’s about 1900 yards of wool that was originally a grayish color. I’ve over-dyed it red (Schucks' brand kool-aid) and it came out exactly as I’d hoped. It’s a sort of faded brick red that will someday become a gansey-type sweater.

I love the colors and the effects of the Jacquard Acid dyes and I was very pleased with how easy they were to use. This is Chartreuse. Very Chartreuse. I’m inordinately in love with both this and with the golden lace weight below.

This was done in the remains of the orange (mix of yellow and vermillion Jacquard dyes) from below. Somehow the first batch soaked up almost all the red and left this beautiful gold for this last batch.

These were soaked in tea bags. I really love how they came out.

The lace weight

And the fingering weight

These are skeins of superwash fingering weight that I thought I would do a bright mix. They came out a little messy. For these I had 2 pots. One with yellow and one with chartreuse. I hung the skeins over the 2 pots with an end in each. Then, once those were done, I rinsed them, put a plastic mixing spoon through each end and then hung the middle of the skein into the orange mixture. I wasn’t completely happy with the colors so I did a final pass with them through another yellow pot. That made it better but it also made a bit of the mess. Next time I would do the whole skeins in the yellow and then hang it over the 2 pots, one with green and one with orange. I think that would have been a much better way to do it. Live and learn, right? I still think these will make interesting socks.

I do have 2 more skeins that aren't quite finished. I did them with theWilton cake icing dyes. One of the things I love about using these for dying yarn is that you never know what you're going to get. I started out with soaking the skeins in tea and then I was going to use a brown and a light blue to variagate them. Well, they came out as a sort of high desert sunset. The brown was beautiful but the blue broke up into blues, purples, pinks and other colors. The problem was that the parts that had been soaked in tea lost most of that color so I'm going to need to do another color along that side. I think they'll be pretty but I need to decide what colors I need to use to finish them.